Second Site Articles

Web Site Resources

Second Site will make web pages for you. The only other thing you need to know is how to publish those pages, but you may want to know a lot more. The resources listed here can help.

Web Site Hosting Services

If you plan to share your web pages on the World Wide Web, you will need a web hosting service. Family History Hosting (FHH) is a web hosting service dedicated to genealogy sites with special features for Second Site users. WIth FHH, you get the same great service as you get with Second Site.

There are many other web hosting options. Your ISP may provide a home page you can use for this purpose, or you may use free web hosting services. Most of the free options add advertising or other content to your pages, and in some cases the extra content can interfere with the formatting of your site.

When shopping for web hosting services, it's important to remember that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. All web hosting services have a finite amount of resources (bandwidth, disk space, etc.) and those resources are shared in some manner by customers. Some deceptive web hosting services promise each customer oodles of disk space, etc., but when any particular customer attempts to use more than a fraction of what was promised, the company deactivates the account. Other companies simply over-sell their services and while they do not deactivate accounts, their customers are disappointed by poor response time or other problems. Caveat emptor.

Registering a Domain

If you want your own domain name, you need to register a domain. Web hosting services will often include a service to register a domain, and using that service may be an inexpensive option. Domain names are separate from web hosting services, however, and it is important that you retain control over the domain. In the future, you may want to move your site from one web hosting service to another. If your web hosting provider has control over the domain, that will complicate the process.

There are a number of companies that offer domain registration services. As of 2014, I've been recommending Namecheap. They are a reliable provider and their prices are reasonable. I have no financial arrangement with them and I receive no benefit if you happen to choose Namecheap to register your domain.

FTP Resources

In the past I recommended FileZilla, but in March, 2015 I learned that the FileZilla installer now includes Binkiland, a browser hijacker virus. That's unacceptable, and everyone should avoid using any version of FileZilla that includes it.

TMG Resources

Many testers said that Second Site helped them find problems with their data and their TMG sentences. If you have a question about TMG, make sure you visit the Wholly Genes web site and Lee Hoffman's TMG Tips web site. Lee's site includes links to many other pages and resources.